Every now and then, you come across people who claim: “Brosnan was a great Bond, but his films had bad scripts.” I couldn’t disagree more. His films balanced entertainment, romance, and drama in just the right measure, without breaking the mould of what a Bond adventure is meant to be.
The villains were human, yet their suffering was never forced on the audience. Just a few words were enough to give them depth without asking for pity: Trevelyan’s Lienz Cossack past, Elektra’s abandonment during her kidnapping, Renard’s terminal condition and need for love. The women were attractive and useful: the much-misjudged Christmas Jones saves 007’s life more than once, and she proves to be cleverer than a room full of security guards in Kazakhstan when “Arkov” chimes in.
The plots were brilliant and engaging overall. They modernized the formula without betraying it, and vividly reflected the eras in which they were released. All in all, I think Brosnan was a great Bond with great films, precisely because the universe is what builds a Bond — not just the actor. He looks the part, has the charm, the ruthlessness, and the way with the ladies… but just like the old adage says, “the clothes make the man,” I believe “the world makes the Bond” — and that world is crafted by many people, not just one.
In the following paragraphs, I’ll leave you with some context regarding each of the four Brosnan adventures and some observations I’ve made. If this interests you, I recommend checking out The Bond of the Millennium, particularly the updated edition from 2023, which greatly expands on these themes.
GoldenEye (1995) deals heavily with post-Cold War insecurities and the relevance of a field operative in a world dominated by technology. Many films released during the first half of the 1990s had a villain with a Soviet past and a situation that could endanger détente (The Hunt for Red October, Terminal Velocity, Fair Game). Other films underlined the danger that could be caused by the anonymity of the Internet and computers (Hackers, The Net). Both plotlines were combined in GoldenEye, which served as a bridge between the fears of the old world order and the fears of the new world order, with Bond as a catalyst to keep the world safe. The dramatis personae include a sadomasochist femme fatale, a cyberpunk, and two abandoned former spies turned arms dealers. One of these spies is the main villain, once known as agent 006 and a close friend to Bond. Interestingly, this would mark a trend in some action movies like Mission: Impossible, Broken Arrow and The Rock (all released in 1996) whose antagonists are former spies or soldiers who turn against their own nations for reasons ranging from greed to frustration with bureaucracy to a sense of obsolescence in their roles. This archetype contrasts with Bond’s patriotic image, a “loyal terrier” of the British as per Trevelyan’s words. Structurally, the film makes sure that all the boxes are ticked regarding the character’s tradition as a way to reinforce that the old 007 is the antidote to the threats of the new world. The film works as a discreet trial where the protagonist is repeatedly told he is irrelevant and that his attitudes do not work in this world, yet he shows he doesn’t need to change at all to become once again the last hope of a world that rejects him.
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) brings Bond squarely into the 1990s, and the fears of the Cold War are left behind. The villain’s scheme is a familiar one (pit two superpowers against each other), but the methodology and weapons used are linked to subjects that were hot topics back in the day. These topics include the power and effects of mass media during belligerent conflicts — much had been said about the manipulation of images during the Gulf War. Aesthetically, as The Naked Gun (2025) director Akiva Schaffer noted, the movie adopts a look and feel that reflects that era enormously. Much of the imagery is under-lit, the static palette (blue, green, red) is used frequently, and there is a pronounced debate about the fakery of images: the footage of British marines gunned down by Chinese officers, the relationship between media mogul Elliot Carver and his wife, the cybergirls from the main title sequence (which becomes exuberant as TV screens float in front of them). Even the use of Times New Roman for the location subtitles seems to underline this era marked by Windows 98 and Microsoft Word, at the height of their popularity. Throughout the film, Bond acts as an analog hero who exposes the world of fakery generated by Carver: he cuts the broadcast as the villain delivers a hypocritical speech about the escalating conflict; he seduces the villain’s wife (and Bond’s former lover) only hours after she boasted about her privileged life, revealing that her marriage is nothing more than a fantasy; he tears down a Big Brother–like banner of Carver while escaping from his headquarters; and, finally, he feeds the villain into the very drill he used to sink a British ship, as MI6 reports Carver’s death as “missing, presumed drowned.”
The World Is Not Enough (1999) marks the end of the millennium, and it would be the last Bond film of the century in which he was created. Maybe as a reflection of this, new technologies became somewhat “domestic”: we see Elektra using a laptop in the comfort of her room, rather than inside an office. Christmas uses a palm-print reader to defuse a nuclear bomb. The villains and Bond use Motorola walkie-talkies, and MI6 has its own “Encarta Encyclopedia” at the improvised Scottish castle headquarters. Putting that aside, one of the biggest themes in the story is corporate corruption. Sir Robert King, a respected oil tycoon and personal friend of M, has dealings with the underworld that allowed him to buy a classified file (Bond raises eyebrows at her comment that King is “a man of great integrity”). There is a shady Swiss banker who was connected to that money exchanging hands. Later, his daughter Elektra is intimately connected to an Eastern European terrorist with a high body count, and to an arms dealer like Zukovsky (whom we had previously seen in GoldenEye), who gets her a nuclear submarine through his nephew, a corrupt Russian sailor. Much of the film takes place in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic with several oligarchs as a product of their oil fields. Prostitution is around the corner at Zukovsky’s casino (early script drafts made this even more evident) and a pilot working for an antiterrorist unit in Kazakhstan is bribed with a simple pair of Adidas tennis shoes (another unused line from the script claimed that “here you could get anything for a pack of cigarettes”). The film underlines a breach between the lower and upper classes felt in most of the Soviet nations failing to adhere to free market economy – in both GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough, Zukovsky finds it hard to make a living out of his few legitimate activities. For the first time, there is an event in the story that precedes Bond and involves the maternal affection from M towards Elektra and the potential relationship with her father (former lover?). The movie was preparing us for an era where the villains and allies had a past that influenced the present in which the film’s plot develops. Literally, everything that happens in the film is the consequence of things that happened in the past due to human actions: Sir Robert not paying for his daughter’s ransom — following M’s advice — led her to form an allegiance with Renard, which came back with a vengeance. Bond, who is emotionally unattached to these events, solves this threat with his usual professionalism.
Die Another Day (2002) reflects a
much more insecure world than ever before. The 9/11 attacks made places like
the United States and the United Kingdom less safe than what they once were,
and there was a lot of talk regarding this “Axis of Evil” (North Korea, Iran,
Iraq) with profound hatred towards the West — nations with their own
totalitarian set of rules, dangerous enough to provoke fear amidst
civilization. The Americans, nearly absent from the first Brosnan films, came
back to have the ultimate say on the War on Terror, to the point MI6 is “told
off” by the NSA due to Bond’s rogue attitudes during the first half of the
film. The idea that the enemy could be “one of ours” was reflected in the
villains. While the main antagonist is in the conflict-diamond trade, his
intention is purely political and ideological, mirroring this hatred of the
West held by the Axis of Evil (the villain is, in fact, a North Korean officer
infiltrated into British society, with an MI6 mole at his disposal). A
virtual-reality training sequence with masked terrorists assaulting the heart
of British intelligence underlines the post-9/11 fears to perfection. After his
capture in North Korea, Bond is exchanged and then abandoned by his government.
This underscores that, unlike soldiers or police officers, spies are treated
like assets more than human beings – and when we consider how much M trusted
Bond with the Elektra King case in the previous film, the way she deprives him
of his freedom has a special, poignant gravitas. The ubiquity of CGI in
Hollywood (which meant a renaissance of the fantasy genre) as well as speed
ramps and slow-motion cameras had a major influence on the style of the film.
In the early 2000s, the horrific images of the World Trade Center burning down
coexisted with the rise of celebrity-scandal culture typified by Paris Hilton
and the rise of reality shows. Die
Another Day has been criticized for being two films different in tone, but
this duality is actually what makes the film a passionate reflection of its
time. From the downbeat marching percussion of “Some Kind of Hero,” with
colourless visuals of the DMZ, to the hopeful notes of “Going Down Together,”
with shiny and warm vistas of a paradisiacal South Korean location where Bond
has his warrior’s rest, both David Arnold’s soundtrack and David Tattersall’s
cinematography serve as a healing for the pain the character goes through in a
film where his future is at stake and he regains his strength.
I have written several articles on the Brosnan era in the past decade, you can find a compilation of them (some have been lost in sites that are now extinct, or published only in Spanish) in my ebook The Brosnan Files, which is available exclusively through ZOOM Platform as a DRM-Free PDF file.
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